Are You Maximizing Your Investment in Technology?

Given the way that we manage technology projects, I doubt it very much.

Companies invest upwards of a billion dollars or more annually in technology and yet many have no idea what the work is let alone if it is aligned with strategic drivers for the business.

And whether you are using traditional methods of project management or have tried to move to more Agile delivery methods, you haven’t fundamentally solved the biggest challenge in technology work, we haven’t created a consistent way to define value as it relates to our strategic needs.

In most technology planning efforts, our functional leaders are responsible for identifying projects that they believe are valuable. However, what this usually means is that they find projects that are important to them, projects they see other people in the industry doing, or simply find projects that will keep their teams funded regardless of if they have the technical skill sets to deliver on the projects (a real-world example).

The reality is that most of us who are helping lead an organization, are mired in the depths of complicated operating structures where it’s hard to see the end-to-end value. So, we seek to optimize our little neck of the woods without too much conversation with other parts of the organization. The problem with this is that in large companies, there are cross-technical/platform dependencies everywhere, so making a change to support your project may not align with where other parts of the organization are moving. Want to understand why projects fail, start here.

So how do you start to maximize your technology investment? Manage it as an investment portfolio that is value outcome based. Aligning the entire organization with a holistic view of value, that is aligned to strategic outcomes and can be scored via value factors, is at the heart of my QValue which will help you maximize the ROI of your strategic vision.

How does QValue work?

We start first by analyzing and evaluating your strategies. Are they clear, do they provide outcomes that can be translated into outcomes? Are leaders aligned with the strategies and understand how they translate into operational direction?

We also evaluate the past few years of projects to determine how many were aligned with strategies and if they had quantifiable outcomes that could or were tracked post-project completion.

We run a survey across the organization to assess the level of understanding of the organization’s strategies and how they factor into projects and new initiatives. It is important that as we move towards a holistic translation of your strategies into strategic value factors, everyone, especially your leaders, have a clear understanding of the strategies and how they translate into their ideation efforts.

Once we have completed the strategy assessment, we move to the value factor creation step. In this step, we align value outcomes to no more than six (6) value factors each with 4–5 associated value outcomes. Value outcomes will be associated with a range of quantifiable outcomes. If the organization is large and comprised of somewhat disparate operating groups, we may advise that we identify a set of cross-organizational value factors (2 or 3) and then have the remaining value factors be specific to that operating business unit. This is situational based on the organization’s design.

With the value factor identification complete we then move on to developing the organization’s risk profile and establishing risk factors related to their project/team delivery predictability. Higher levels of unpredictability is often the cause of projects exceeding their planned investment amount, which will have a negative impact on the expected value being delivered. Ensuring that you monitor the overall investment (cost) against the expected value, ensures that you maximize your technology investment. Just as a money manager would sell off underperforming securities, so should your organization stop investing in projects that have negative ROI.

With our value factor scoring and risk assessment models in place, the final piece of QValue surrounds changing or optimizing your Portfolio Intake process to support continuous planning. If you are a traditional organization (waterfall) the QValue intake process would support a more efficient annual planning effort. If you are Agile this takes your agile delivery model to new heights and delivers value and decision-making faster than traditional delivery methods.

We simply spend way too much on technology without having a transparent view as to whether or not the investment we are making is the right one at any moment in time.

If you would like to learn more you can go to www.soundagile.com or contact me at michael@soundagile.